Years You Have Left to Live, Probably
flowingdata.com
flowingdata.com
I'm the same as the author, a 34 year old male. For me, chances are pretty concentrated on me living a good few decades more. Which is ok, I can plan for that. I'll need a house to live in for the next 30 years, changing careers could be done, etc. I'm pretty unlikely to die in the next couple of decades, so hopefully I'll see my kids go to college. Chances of dying earlier are so low I can basically ignore them.
It also makes me sad about my high school classmate who passed away at 29. Set the marker to 18 and you have to wait quite a while before one of the simulations ends at 29 or earlier.
For someone older, there's an interesting issue. Say I put in my father's age, 71. There's a 1/3 chance of not making it to 81. But then there's also a 20% chance of making it past 91. What do you do about that? You can't spend all your money now. But you can't not spend it, either. Should you wait until next year to see your old friends? The likelihood is flattened out, which makes it quite hard to decide things.
Pensions and annuities, unlike private retirement savings in stocks and bonds, spread this risk out among many people. Your father could get about $650 per month guaranteed for life for every $100,000 he puts in an annuity today.
Also plenty of things are not purely financial. How will you know if this is the last opportunity to see an old friend? As a 34 year old there are plenty of friends I put off catching up with because it will happen someday. As a 71 year old?
It shows your life in blocks of weeks, up till your 80.
Edit: I bought the domain back :) http://moriclock.com/ (might still be propagating)
... I then clicked the age of death and couldn't change it :(
I am in my 40s, so I'll give the current life expectancy stats about a 50% chance of being valid by the time I reach the age to die.
But somebody who is 10 today, will likely have a life expectancy much longer than the 80 yeas. The entire curve will be pushed out. So for that person, I'd guess the probability of this being correct is closer to 10%.
> But somebody who is 10 today, will likely have a life
> expectancy much longer than the 80 years
Also note that policies like this require ongoing maintenance payments, otherwise you forfeit past payments and benefits.
The problem with claiming that the life insurance market is a predictor for death statistics is that firms tend to keep the most important data and calculations used to derive their pricing schemes secret. The firm is only concerned with keeping to projections as far out as they can model.
The consumer has no real input into the model (except as a selector of alternatives) and therefore cannot obtain much knowledge about actual death statistics (except perhaps a near meaningless lower-bound).
Anyway, pensions and life insurance will most likely be bailed out when the crash comes, and the expectation of this socialization of losses might explain some of what is observed there in the sense that they are not responding aggressively to the actuarial community's ever more strident warnings on the uncertainty of their projections. Also people are not particularly rational in their expectations about aging - see this for example, a survey of the actuaries who are the same time as warning that life expectancy predictions are increasingly uncertain due to medical advances in the works, still base their future expectations on what happened to their grandparents:
https://www.dovepress.com/longevity-expectations-in-the-pens...
If I buy a life insurance policy for a 15 year old today, I pay them $X in order to receive $Y when the insured dies. If the insured lives for 70 years, the insurance company has 70 years to invest $X, in order to have $Y available when the insured dies.
But if the insured lives 80 years, then the insurance company has 10 more years to invest $X. They gain from that situation, rather than lose.
Social Security is an example of this, http://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/agereduction.html. This, of course, requires an act of Congress to change. But businesses aren't so limited, new employees can be brought in on a new pension system while grandfathering in the old ones, with few (if any) legal holdups.
The extra uncertainty in actuarial assumptions will only leverage that problem further. Your assessment of expectations is actually pretty reasonable: pension fund managers aren't taking it seriously because they expect to be bailed out regardless, so they may as well enjoy their moral hazard dividends in advance. But I think that has more to do with the fact that financial repression and systemic underfunding have rendered everything else irrelevant anyway.
Mortality improvements are important, but immaterial in this context ;)
I think that this should be taken as more of a qualitative illustration of the uncertainty of life, as opposed to a quantitative measurement.
Are you saying the assumption that the curve will change significantly is questionable or that the effects of the assumed change in the curve change are immaterial?
IE, if we accept an assumption that the curve will shift such that average life expectancy at birth is 110 50 years from today, how is this immaterial for a 30 year old today? My common sense understanding is that their chance of kicking it in the 30-35 age bracket is locked in, but once they get to 65, the curve will have shifted enough that their chance of kicking it between 65-70 (a more substantial risk) have meaningfully decreased.
Take this extreme scenario.. say we accept Aubrey De Grey's most optimistic (and probably misquoted) prediction that "the first person to live to 1,000 will be born in the next two decades," then that seems to obviously affect people alive today materially, especially if they are young.
Sorry, that's not quite what I am saying.
My point was that "given the purpose of this analysis, mortality factors are immaterial."
If the purpose of this analysis was to give some quantitative answers that were going to be used as the basis for decisions - then it's highly likely that you would want to build in mortality improvement.
However, in this case the analysis is just a simple illustration to convey a simple idea (actual lifespan vs life expectancy), and I would say that building in mortality improvement would muddy the waters and make it just that little bit harder for the audience to understand.
If I'm reading correctly, it seems they tried to deduce the bottom chart from the top chart, which is not appropriate for the reason you wrote.
The top chart only considers ONE year into the future from TODAY, based on someone's age TODAY. More specifically -- It's a chart for survival analysis (predict rate of failure, based on a certain fixed time period and a certain starting date) not life expectancy (predict the time period over which a certain fixed rate of failure occurs, based on any future date.)
The bottom chart though, should be far more influenced by the predicted increase in life expectancy -- since it would have to account for decades of predicted average life expectancy improvement, instead of just increase in average predicted life expectancy over one year, which probably has a negligible effect on the top chart.
Overall, great visualization, though. Really like how it highlights the concept of chance and the range of outcomes beyond a single average number.
I think it should be more accurate as they at WorldBank collect the data from multiple sources and process it in a scientifically precise manner. You can enter country you live in, which can make a dramatic difference.
Google also a site where you can graph the WorldBank data in a zillion ways; I'm shocked that I didn't know about it earlier:
https://www.google.co.nz/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9...
Quote of the week!
Most of the people alive today will probably (unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your world view) be among the last generations to die from what we currently consider natural causes.
I don't doubt that it will happen, but I do doubt the timescales involved. Possibly children alive today will benefit from these advances, but 'most people alive today' seems unlikely.
Back in the real world, we can't even agree as a society what level of healthcare should be afforded to all members vs. what level you have to earn.
The greatest advancements in life extension in recent years have only added more years of horribly low quality life. I don't want to die, but I am going to. Why should I invest my resources to spend years suffering?
"For a typical person aged 65, life expectancy increased by 0.7 years between 1992 and 2005. Disability-free life expectancy increased by 1.6 years; disabled life expectancy fell by 0.9 years.
"The reduction in disabled life expectancy and increase in disability-free life expectancy is true for both genders and for non-whites as well as whites. Hence, morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death."
And, given that part of the low quality of life at end of life comes from two thirds of people not thinking through and documenting their wishes for care, one can improve one's personal odds by creating and advanced health care directive. And of course, many of the things that we dislike about old age result from chronic conditions that can be addressed through good nutrition and exercise.
So, good news, end of life isn't as bad as you fear!
In reality, you'd likely better be able to predict your remaining years if you have more details about yourself (you should, unless you're Benjamin Kyle). Are you a long-term heavy smoker, overweight like most Americans, or do you work in a dangerous job like construction? You're more likely to live less. On the other hand, do you have a safe job, stay physically fit, and avoid alcohol and drugs? You're more likely to live more.
Why? What exactly is it that you think "life insurance" does? If there were a product that would reduce the variance in remaining life length, that might be interesting, but that's not what "life insurance" is. All it does is pay someone else some amount of money when you die, after you pay them some (usually increasing) amount each year while you're alive (with countless weird financial variants for those who really like being taken to the cleaners). The ev of every such policy is negative, as it is for all types of insurance. You are almost certainly better off taking the money you would have spent on premiums and investing it conservatively; that's all the insurer is going to do with it anyway, and that way you don't have to give them a cut or worry about them going out of business before you die.
As always, the primary exception to this rule is adverse selection: if you know something about yourself that makes you much more likely to die soon, isn't reflected in actuarial tables, and won't be found by a medical exam (if required), then it may be to your designated beneficiary's advantage to buy insurance. But a healthy 34-year-old is so unlikely to die any time soon that they'll almost always be better off if you just stick money into some tax-deferred account and designate a beneficiary. Which is probably what you ought to be doing anyway, just in case you do happen to live a long time.
For example, if you have to spend $10,000 on medical bills, that might be 1 unit of disutility. But if you have to spend $100,000 on medical bills, that might be 30 units of disutility, not 10, because you just don’t have that kind of money and you will go bankrupt and your quality of life will go way down. With this reasoning, health insurance might have a positive EV for utility, even though it has a premium that gives you a negative EV for money.
This reasoning is less likely to apply to life insurance, because people are less likely to care about what happens after they die. But for people whose beneficiaries would suffer a lot from losing their income – perhaps they would be evicted – life insurance can be worth it.
Obviously, though, we don't know how this value will change in future years, so this isn't really a fault of the chart so much as it is an unavoidable limitation. Some sort of model could be introduced for predicting healthcare advances, but I doubt anyone can do so reliably enough to produce a net increase in accuracy here.
It's true that a war isn't necessarily relevant
Still, the possibility of not making it another 10 years is quite a bit higher than I am personally comfortable with, at pretty much any age. If someone has an idea for an immortality startup, I would definitely be willing to pay the $29 subscription. I would even seriously consider the $79 pro tier.
Any hearsay over some technology that might exist to expand our lifetimes completely misses the point. There will never be an absolute end to death. Even the Sun will eventually explode, and even beyond that the universe itself will probably die in heat death. Where will we be then? At what point do we think that we will have "lived enough"? Why do we assume that if we only live longer that we'll somehow be more cool with being dead some day? Is there anything in our experience that suggests we're more OK with death the older you get?
Why talk about tomorrow - we can eat right now!
From a different angle, if 15% of males my age will die in the next 30 years, how many of those are foreseeable due to current circumstances vs accidents that could happen to anyone?
I was investigating this topic for some time and it turns out that the mortality curve is interesting: grows exponentially in time. In some sense, we start "aging" at the age of 6-8 y.o. (the safest age in Western countries). Plus, there is a bump of mortality in around 20, much more pronounced for males (accidents).
See e.g. https://plot.ly/~PiotrMigdal/11/mortality-rate-by-age-and-ge... And more info on the exponential growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_o...
By comparison, there's a continuous trickle of marbles falling off randomly early.
So what I take from the simulation is that there are two main components: the random stuff that can take you out at any time, and then there's a more-or-less fixed amount of "gas" you have - when that one is gone, it's gone.
People find it depressing, but it tells me not to waste my (limited) time.
From a command-line perspective, though, there's xkcd's actuary.py - http://blog.xkcd.com/2012/07/12/a-morbid-python-script/ - which has some nice options.
"Hey, you have only 200 more months to live. Don't waste a month doing something stupid."
But you won't. You will be living through the period of technological development from now until an undefined future date, and we are in the early years of a great and sweeping revolution in the capabilities of biotechnology and medicine.
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The cautious majority believes that human life span will continue to increase, but only incrementally, much as it has done for the past few decades - both life expectancy at birth and life expectancy after 60, due to the continued introduction of new medical technologies. (Which proceeds far more slowly than it could, thanks to the heavy hand of the state). One faction of epidemiologists even argues for the possibility of a dip in overall life expectancy as present trends in obesity take their toll - to their eyes the consequences of being overweight look set to outweigh modest gains due to advances in medicine.
To my mind, arguing for incrementalism in any trend relating to medicine at the present time is choosing to go against the tide. The biotechnologies that underpin advances in medicine are going through a period of massive, revolutionary change. While it is true that organizations such as the FDA do pretty much everything short of shooting scientists to slow down and increase the cost of turning research into therapies, the rapid pace of progress in the life sciences will win through.
Allow me to put forward a historical analogy: standing in 2012 and arguing a case for gentle future changes in life expectancy over the next few decades, based on the past few decades, is something like standing in 1885 or so and arguing that speed and convenience of passenger travel will steadily and gently increase in the decades ahead. The gentleman prognosticator of the mid-1880s could look back at steady progress in the operating speed of railways and similar improvement in steamships throughout the 19th century. He would be aware of the prototyping of various forms of engine that promised to allow carriages to reliably proceed at the pace of trains, and the first frail airships that could manage a fair pace in flight - though by no means the equal of speed by rail.
Like our present era, however, the end of the 19th century was a time of very rapid progress and invention in comparison to the past. In such ages trends are broken and exceeded. Thus within twenty years of the first crudely powered and fragile airships, heavier than air flight launched in earnest: a revolutionary change in travel brought on by the blossoming of a completely new branch of applied technology. By the late 1920s, the aircraft of the first airlines consistently flew four to five times as fast as the operating speed of trains in 1880, and new lines of travel could be set up for a fraction of the cost of a railway. Little in the way of incrementalism there: instead a great and sweeping improvement accomplished across a few decades and through the introduction of a completely new approach to the problem.
This is one of many historical examples of discontinuities in gentle trends brought about by fundamentally new technologies. Returning to the medicine of the present day, there are any number of lines of work we could point to as analogous to the embryonic component technologies of an aircraft in 1885. They are still in the lab, or only being trialed, or still under development - but they exist in great numbers. There are the SENS technologies; a range of advanced applications of immunotherapy; targeting methodologies to safely destroy specific cell types; organ engineering; and others. Just because we can't see the exact shape of the emerging technologies that will be constructed atop these foundations doesn't make them any less likely to be created: great changes are coming down the line in medicine. The future is not one of steady and incremental progress.